Starting with VxRail version 7.0.130, NIC teaming can be configured on the VxRail non-management networks with a both a customer-supplied and VxRail-supplied virtual distributed switch after the cluster initial implementation process is complete. NIC teaming enables the formation of a link aggregation group, which is a logical port that represents a pair of physical ports on a VxRail node. If the ports on the top-of-rack switches connected to these logical ports are also configured into a link aggregation group, peering between the two link aggregation groups will enable an active-active port configuration and support load balancing for network optimization.

Figure 44.          Enabling link aggregation for load balancing

The following rules are applicable for enabling link aggregation:

• A minimum of 4 Ethernet ports per VxRail node is required for the VxRail networks.

• 2 ports configured to support VxRail management networks (Management/vCenter/VxRail discovery)
• 2 ports configured to support vSAN and vMotion. 

• Can be all NDC ports, all PCIe ports, or a mixture of NDC and PCIe ports

• If all of your VxRail networks are on NDC-based ports, you can migrate the non-management VxRail networks to PCIe-based ports to enable NIC redundancy.

• All VxRail node ports configured for link aggregation must be the same speed.
• Link aggregation can only be configured on the non-management VxRail networks.

• If you want to enable load balancing only on the vSAN network, you have the option to migrate the vMotion network over to the ports supporting the VxRail management networks

Depending on your data center networking policies and features supported on the top-of-rack switches, either a static LAG or dynamic LAG can be configured for load balancing.

A static LAG requires:

• Static port channels to be configured on the ports on the adjacent top-of-rack switches
• The teaming policy on the portgroup is set to ‘Route based on IP Hash’. This will calculate a hash using the source and destination IP address of each packet.

A dynamic LAG requires:

• Dynamic port channels are configured on the adjacent top-of-rack switches
• LACP support on the adjacent top-of-rack switches. If LACP is not supported on the switches, a static LAG is the only option.
• An LACP policy is configured on the virtual distributed switch.

• The load-balancing setting on the LACP policy is compatible with the supported load-balancing hash algorithms on the adjacent top-of-rack switches.

Figure 45.          LACP Policy configuration on virtual distributed switch